BOSTON — Three Massachusetts communities will soon be wired for electronic health record systems as part of a $50 million pilot project.
The idea, being undertaken by the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, is to test out the implementation of interoperable EHRs within communities before attempting to connect physicians across the entire state.
“We're completely focused on practical solutions so we can get these things into physicians' hands and health care professionals' hands and keep them there,” Micky Tripathi, CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative said at a congress sponsored by the American Medical Informatics Association.
The collaborative is a not-for-profit group founded by 34 health care institutions seeking to create a statewide health information network. The collaborative was launched last fall and requested applications for its pilot project last December. They received 35 applications from communities across the state and chose three—greater Brockton, greater Newburyport, and Northern Berkshire. The pilot is being funded through a grant from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts.
Each community chosen was a relatively self-contained medical referral market, had strong local health care professional leadership, and demonstrated an openness to information technology (IT) innovation, Mr. Tripathi said.
The final selections were based in part on location, patient diversity, and IT maturity, he said. Members of the collaborative also wanted to choose communities at different points of the IT adoption curve in order to see the different types of benefits. The three communities cover nearly 600 physicians treating roughly 500,000 patients. Overall, there are 182 primary care physicians and 410 specialists. The pilots will include almost 200 offices sites, most of which have one to five physicians, he said.
The pilot projects will include the purchase and installation of EHRs at all clinical care points, as well as connecting them to other systems within the community.
Although existing studies have shown the benefit of EHRs on a small scale, Mr. Tripathi said this pilot is a chance to see what will happen in a larger, community-wide rollout. The pilot will be aimed at determining the barriers to adoption, identifying the costs—both direct and indirect—of adoption, and analyzing the benefits. Officials at the collaborative will also be seeking to figure out how the costs and benefits are distributed across stakeholders.